ScholarLed will play a key role in a major new project to develop Open Access monograph publishing, supported by a £2.2 million grant from Research England.
ScienceOpen is a freely accessible research network to share and evaluate scientific information. We aggregate Open Access articles from a variety of sources – opening them up to commenting and discussion. Manuscripts submitted to ScienceOpen will be published Open Access and evaluated in a fully transparent Post-Publication Peer Review process.
In this post I'm going to try to set down my current thoughts about the evolution of academic publishing. This is very much a work in progress so please excuse me if it's not entirely coherent. I came back from Science Online London fired up and this is the next stage in me grokking the tools discussed there such as Figshare and ORCID.
figshare allows researchers to publish all of their data in a citable, searchable and sharable manner. All data is persistently stored online under the most liberal Creative Commons licence, waiving copyright where possible. This allows scientists to access and share the information from anywhere in the world with minimal friction.
Open Access (OA) advocates argue that PLoS ONE is now the largest scholarly journal in the world. Its parent organisation — Public Library of Science (PLoS) — was co-founded in 2001 by Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus. What does the history of PLoS tell us about the development of PLoS ONE? What does the success of PLoS ONE tell us about OA? And what does the current rush by other publishers to clone PLoS ONE tell us about the future of scholarly communication?